Entries from February 2010 ↓

I like many people get shed loads of letters from anyone who doesn’t care about the trees. Yesterday I got a letter from O2 (my mobile network) saying that they are going to stop sending me paper bills and instead I have use their website or iPhone app to check my bill.

Typical for big corporates stuck in old days, not only did they create a user name for me, they used my abbreviated name with a random four digit number as they user name. I now have to use this username and come up with a password that has at least 5 different “security” requirements. A website that I am going to use once or twice a year with a very bad user name and a worse password means disaster.

This time instead of putting the letter in my draw, I decided to use my Brother DC-540CN printer/scanner and scan the letters. This scanner has an automatic document feeder which makes it even easier. But the beauty of it was when I realised I can scan the letters to a TIFF file and turn on Windows 7 OCR feature. Seconds later, I could type O2, mobile or iPhone in my Start Menu and a scan of the letter from my stupid network provider popped up instantly. Brilliant!

Hoptoad is a web based application that captures your application’s exceptions and errors. It has some simple de-duplication algorithm and forwards new exceptions to your email box. It also tracks your deployment and resolved exceptions.

It is build for Ruby projects but it can be used for .NET apps as well (I wish people behind it would make it more generic than what it is now). For ASP .NET applications, there is another similar application called Exceptioneer but it doesn’t have an open API (you need to add their assembly to your project) and is very isolated to ASP .NET web applications. It is also in private beta.

I use log4net for almost all my projects, so I thought I should write a Hoptoad appender for log4net. The Hoptoad client itself is not locked into log4net and can be used standalone as well. Download the code here

Perhaps the next step is to write the same thing for ELMAH.

To configure the log4net appender use something like the following section:

        <appender name=&amp;quot;HoptoadAppender&amp;quot; type=&amp;quot;SharpHop.HoptoadAppender, SharpHop&amp;quot;>
            <ApiKey value=&amp;quot;xxxx&amp;quot;/>
            <EnvironmentName value=&amp;quot;Dev&amp;quot;/>
            <AppName value=&amp;quot;Your app name&amp;quot;/>
            <AppVersion value=&amp;quot;1.0.0.0&amp;quot;/>
            <AppUrl value=&amp;quot;http://yoururl.com&amp;quot;/>
            <layout type=&amp;quot;log4net.Layout.PatternLayout&amp;quot;>
                <conversionPattern value=&amp;quot;[%thread] %-5level %logger{1}: %message&amp;quot; />
            </layout>
        </appender>

UPDATE: SharpHop now has a home at GoogleCode as an open source project with Apache Licene.